Inanimate Plastic: Free Inside Specially Marked Boxes Vol. 4

It only took several years and then a month and a half of being “safe at home” for me to return to the world of blogging. Honestly, I was inspired to return by both a lack of reading material at my usual blog haunts and a recent purchase that has yet to arrive. When it does, I plan on featuring it on the blog. Until then, let’s have a look at another set of cereal premiums from the glorious 1980s - Kellogg’s Starbots!

The year was 1985. Children everywhere were obsessed with robots that transformed into other things. Every toy company under the sun was trying to get a piece of the action. And cereal companies were, too. Kellogg’s released four different Starbots inside boxes of various cereals (for certain they were available in Apple Jacks, Froot Loops and Honey Smacks). The Starbots included a jet-thing, a space shuttle-thing, a helicopter-thing and a spaceship-thing (evocative of the starship Enterprise). All four would rank high on any list of the Transformers’ ugly cousins. That being said, they were freebies inside cereal so what do you expect?

As a child, I owned both the shuttle and spaceship toys and remember them fondly. So it was with great enthusiasm that I welcomed the shuttle and the plane back into my collection as an adult. I did not apply their stickers as I was unsure how well they would actually stick. The shuttle is by far the better of the two in robot mode. The plane’s odd proportions in robot mode make it difficult to stand. I will say that the corkscrew-like mechanism to reveal the plane’s robot head is interesting. Too bad it can’t hide its hands in vehicle mode (something the shuttle manages to do). The Starbots were available in red, white, blue and gray/silver. The cereal boxes show them as available in yellow but I’ve never actually seen a yellow example.